A joint open letter in support of FRPAA to Sen. John Cornyn (paired with a similar letter to Rep. Mike Doyle) from American Association of Law Libraries, American Library Association, Association of Academic Health Sciences Libraries, Association of College and Research Libraries, Association of Research Libraries, Creative Commons, Greater Western Library Alliance, Public Knowledge, Public Library of Science, and the Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC).

The last two decades have been decades of volunteerism. Mandates, though mooted, have hardly been tried yet. But if FRPAA passes, and if the EU proceeds with some of its planned recommendations to its member states concerning university OA mandates, and if EOS's policy-guidance thereon is successful -- ensuring that the right, convergent, collaborative mandates are adopted by both funders and universities (ID/OA, Liege Model, Deposit Institutionally, Harvest Centrally), instead of wishy-washy or competitive ones, I think the mandate decade is only just beginning (and that the right mandates have the power to generate 100% Green, Gratis OA in short order -- just as volunteerism could have done, if only it had been done...) My own efforts are now fully dedicated to EOS, FRPAA and the EU mandates, as re-affirmed last week in Budapest at the 10th anniversary meeting of the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI-II).

"Two diametrically opposed bills have been introduced in this session of Congress seeking to address the issue of providing free public access to published articles based on research funded by federal agencies. As an association, AAUP supports neither. The first, the Research Works Act (RWA),...would prohibit any federal agency from adopting a policy that requires online distribution of private-sector research publications without the consent of the publisher, or that would require the author or publisher of such work to agree to online distribution of such work. The second, the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA),...would extend the public access policy of the National Institute of Health...to the 11 other federal agencies with extramural research budgets of $100 million or more, and it would cut the embargo period from 12 months to 6 months. AAUP supports the goal of providing free public access to the results of publicly funded research. However, we think the blanket prohibition sought by RWA goes too far. At the same time we also think the one-size-fits-all solution proposed in FRPAA is unworkable. It mistakenly assumes that no more than 6 months will be required for publishers to recover the investment they have made in preparing research works for publication, in all fields and across all disciplines...."

... “According to a report released in 2005 by the U.S. General Accounting Office, textbook costs rose an astonishingly 186 percent between 1986 and 2004... Frustratingly, some small textbooks seem to often cost exorbitant amounts of money, while larger textbooks are much cheaper. Let’s take one text as an example: “Ovid: Blackwell Introductions to the Classical World” by Katharina Volk. This is a 157-page long textbook, and it’s written for a general undergraduate audience. However, this textbook is $104.95... I find this unacceptable... Placing the Ovid textbook against another longer textbook can help us understand perspective. Let’s take “Workplace Communications: The Basics” by George Searles for example. This is a 312-page long textbook and it’s written for a general, nonwriter audience... This textbook is $70.80. This textbook is longer, contains more information and is a practical textbook, yet it costs about 30 percent less than the Ovid textbook. How is this possible? ... The power of textbook publishers is immense, and I’m afraid they may have a stranglehold on universities. In order to change, we need to begin to realize that knowledge is not always something that needs to be printed and sold. Indeed, there are many of Ovid’s works available online, and there are many online guides for business communication. However, there just isn’t enough open-access online work for instructors to pull from yet... what will it take for instructors and students to start demanding and using freely available open-access volumes of textbooks? It will require a redefinition of knowledge and authority... Fortunately, textbooks only have as much authority as we grant them. So, perhaps it’s time we start granting the same authority to free open-access editions... Students must demand change, and instructors must be willing to enact change.”

“Valentine’s Day marks an anniversary of a declaration that came to define ‘open access’ in Budapest, back in 2002. The Budapest Initiative states: ‘By ‘open access’ to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.’ Cameron Neylon kindly reminds us of how it was 10 years ago, at the time the declaration was published... “

“Every year, the government funnels tens of billions of dollars toward scientific research — research that you help pay for with your taxes. These government-funded investigations give rise to an average of 65,000 peer-reviewed papers a year. Many of these papers, however, remain inaccessible to you unless you happen to subscribe to the journal in which they're published, and some of these journals are pretty expensive. Think you should be able to access this research free of charge? So do a lot of other people — in fact, legislation was just introduced that could make open-access government-funded science a reality... The legislation in question is a bill entitled the Federal Research Public Access Act or FRPAA. The upshot of the bill is that it would make papers that report on government-funded research publicly available within six months of their publication, regardless of where they were printed (be it Nature, PNAS, etc.), or the research institution that submitted them to be published...”